It’s alive.
Tossing and turning in bed, stomach growling from an unfortunate combination of pizza, wine, espresso and worry. Restless, gastrointestinally livid from the sound of things, irrationally terrified about, in no particular order, career, money, love, the future and life in general, but alive.
It, in this case, being me, John Salomon, 6’1″ (6’2″ if you stretch the truth a bit), holder of a cobbled-together degree from Berkeley in international relations and economics minus the distasteful statistical and econometric bits, as well as an MBA from INSEAD, long-time IT contractor-cum-consultant, chronic worry-wart, and any number of other only tangentially relevant or interesting qualities that make up this one particular permutation among the 7 billion-odd indubitably equally fascinating, flawed and unique denizens of planet Earth. Hi there.
Seems like a shame to let an otherwise perfectly good bout of insomnia go to waste when we could indulge in a little vanity, along with the hundreds of thousands of others probably dumping their synaptic effluvia all over their keyboards right now, no? So let’s get on with it then.
Writing a novel is one of my many amateurishly pursued, unlikely-to-ever-be-completed-or-successful goals in life, so I’ll steer away from attempting to set up any kind of structure here, and reserve that for a proper diary. And I’ll probably put all sorts of horrible things in it, so you’ll be unlikely to ever know or care what it contains, unless we’re out drinking together. And, of course, assuming you’re even interested in yet another person’s intimate backstory, or have the time to bother (the latter, by the way, is not a particularly long shot, given that, statistically speaking, you are currently likely to be unemployed, as is 125% of the entire human race at this point in time.)
By means of lead-in, I set up my first journal (I hate the word “blog”, it sounds so hung over) in August 2007 as a way to keep track of my experiences as an improbable admittee to business school. A valuable tool, as it turned out, given the human mind’s propensity to whitewash traumatic experiences. It’s an interesting jolt, to read one’s own poured-out frustrations in their unadulterated, raw form, without the benefit of time.
Since finishing my master’s, I moved in with my girlfriend in Paris, spent significant amount of time bellyaching about my near-comical failure to land what normal people would consider a “good” job, made one half-hearted and one serious attempt to start a business, ended up returning to my former IT consulting client on a part-time basis (with a hideous, twice-a-week 6 hours commute for my troubles) and voilà, here we are.
As such, welcome. I’ll try to keep this thing reasonably updated as conscientiously as possible. I also guarantee a complete absence of the following
1. celebrity gossip
2. technical information (go here for that)
3. semi-informed political or economic ruminations (in fact, go here for a vastly more authoritative source on all things half-baked than anything I could ever offer)
4. anything even vaguely useful
Number four is not entirely true. Having successfully navigated innumerable administrative and technological pitfalls around the world in the past few years, largely thanks to varying mixtures of google, naïveté and chutzpah, it’s only fair to give back what little I’ve learned thus far to some poor bastard trying to figure out how to active a Navigo pass on his Vélib account or how to sneak a shipment of shaving cream past Chilean customs.
So please, look around occasionally, read up, say hi, send me good and intelligent links (since reddit contributors are so hell-bent on outdoing each other in the panic-mongering department, these days, reading the results of which before bedtime is really not particularly conducive to refreshing, carefree sleep.)
Now get back to work. Assuming you still have any.
